My friend Nate Oman thinks it’s off-putting/shallow/manipulative/condescending/dishonest when non-believers use religious arguments to try and persuade believers, like when non-Christians argue that the Passion misses the “true meaning” of Christianity or when Westerners argue that Islam is consistent with democracy.
Alas, what of our entire education as lawyers, which is all about making arguments that the other guy will agree with? Of course, the lawyerly education focuses on secular reasons, but I didn’t catch anything in Nate’s post to distinguish religious arguments between believers and non-believers from secular arguments between, say, utilitarians and deontologists.
I agree with Micah here. Often, trying to argue with someone on his own ground doesn’t work, because the non-believers (whether religious or secular) botch. They (unintentionally) misrepresent their adversary’s views because they don’t have a very good understanding of the true basis for those views or their context or what have you. And this goes not just for “persuasion” arguments but also for their cousins, arguments that a particular philosophy is inconsistent (which similarly claims to take a philosophy on its own terms to argue against one of its positions). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard idiocy of the form “If conservatives love life so much that they’re against abortion, how can they be for the death penalty?” (not directed at me) or “How could Justice Bradley (a 19th-century Supreme Court Justice with libertarian views) vote for the blacks in the Slaughterhouse Cases and yet vote against the blacks in the Civil Rights Cases?”
But, as I’ve argued recently in a different context, this isn’t an argument against the genre; when done right, there’s nothing wrong with it, and in fact there can be a lot of good. For one thing, there may be various inconsistencies in a philosophy that never come to light if you leave it to insiders, because people may accept a philosophy (and be under the impression it’s internally consistent) for self-serving reasons — so the philosophy can benefit from an outsider’s perspective.
For another, there’s no ethical obligation to be “honest” in argumentation in this sense. Arguments exist in the abstract; people are just argument delivery devices. If there exists an argument that shows that my philosophy is inconsistent so that I have to adjust the philosophy or change a position or even consciously choose to live with an inconsistency, I should deal with that argument, regardless of whether the guy presenting the argument is self-serving or a creep or Hitler.
Maybe someday soon, I’ll post about a slightly different issue that’s been on my mind recently. When you’re trying to get people to support a position, you can present whatever arguments you like, because in this case you just care about the position getting a lot of support. This argument arguably doesn’t apply when you’re doing pure philosophical argumentation, trying to get someone to come over to your philosophy. There, one might argue, you shouldn’t give reasons for your own philosophy which you yourself believe to be false. But I recently read an op-ed that I took at the time to be dishonest in this sense (I’ve changed my mind since about whether it’s dishonest) and tentatively concluded that even this sort of dishonesty is justifiable. But, perhaps, more on that later.
Comments are closed.